Object explosion

[tMissig]

I have been trying to figure out how to make my object appears as if it was shattering. I want the glass parts of my model to break and explode as if the glass was exploding. But I've tried some of the npartical fx and am not really getting the result I am wanting. Any guidance or direction would be greatly appreciated!

[daunish · Accepted solution]

So Maya famously has no good way of shattering an object. The built-in one is really trash for anything complex:

Create shatter | Maya 2020 | Autodesk Knowledge Network

The next step would be to use a plugin:

Pulldownit : Next Step in Dynamics for VFX

Fracture FX. Demolition tools for Maya | Destruction | Shatter Plugin (fracture-fx.com)

They both are free up to a point and cost money past that.

After that the solution is to use an external program... but you can see things are getting more complex and expensive as we go to better and better solutions.

Let's just say you figure out how to shatter your object. You can always do it by hand with the cut tool, or boolean, so I'm just going to assume you got it at this point.

Next is simulating, I don't recommend using particles, you arent going to get a perfect result that way and will waste a lot of time fiddling around with the settings. I suggest you look into Ridgid Body Dynamics (RBD). There are a couple of ways of doing this in Maya, Cloth (don't recommend it), or Bullet. Both are built into Maya and personally, I'd say go with Bullet, its fast, simple, and the underlying system used in a lot of other RBD solvers in other programs. They even have a handly little tutorial:
Shatter a Rigid Body simulation | Maya 2016 | Autodesk Knowledge Network

Good luck!